The Mysterious An-chan
by FaustoCosgrove
Summary: Warning. This fic features OCs. Poor writing ensues. I'm doing this one for fun, and because the lovely main Madam Canon doesn't get enough love. This story, as stupid as it is, is canon loyal, and could function as nothing more than the stupid filler story for which it is.
1. Ladies, please, hold your confetti

Konahagakure. A few short years before the 9 tails would attack. Not that anyone was aware of that, at the time. She wasn't. She was about to graduate from the ninja academy. She'd get to go on missions, and fight a lot! She was brilliant, and would surely graduate on the top of her class, well, probably. Bah! What did grades matter, when missions were to be held? Real missions!

Anko Mitarashi was lost in thought, out in the training fields, far too excited to decide what to do first. She could practice throwing kunai or shuriken, beat on one of many uprightly fixed training logs or local trees (be nice to nature). Anko really wanted to spar with someone, ah, but alas. She was all alone. Anko sat against a training log, looked up at the sky, closed her eyes, and smiled. Who cares if she was all alone right now? All was right in the world.

Well, she was all alone. Upon opening her eyes, she saw two peering back at her. Well, "peering" may have been an understatement. Make that understatement of the year. It was more like two geysers with sparkles of excitement gushing out of them.

"What-cha-doin'?" asked the stranger.

"Gyaaah!" Anko jumped away from the log.

"Ga-woo! hee-hee-hee!" The stranger giggled. On top of the log stood a girl, no more than 8. "I scare-ded you!" She was wearing a bright blue dress, though the color had nothing on her eyes. She had long, loose, black hair, cut hime style. She stood triumphant in Anko's over-reaction, since that was totally what it had been. "What are we playing next?" the stranger asked.

"Who's playing, you brat?" Anko launched a fist at the stranger. Stupid kid, showing up out of nowhere. I'll show you!

~~

A few hours of playing/attempted malicious assault later, both kids were laying on the ground, unable to move anymore.

"Ha... that was fun." The stranger wheezed.

"Fun?! You were having fun?" Anko snapped.

The stranger looked devastated.

"I was. Weren't you?"

Anko opened her mouth to say something, but stopped, since that something was 'yes'. Then, Anko's brain came back to her. She sat up, though her muscles groaned. "I was chasing you because you appeared out of nowhere! You are the enemy! I am totally going to catch you!" Wait. That might have been the wrong thing to say. Stupid brain!

"Ah! I'm the bad guy today? Let's switch for tomorrow! That way you can have fun, too!"

Anko twitched an eyebrow at the girl. Maybe she's retarded. No. This kid snuck up on her. She has to be an enemy ninja.

"Who are you, anyway?"

"Aoi!" she smiled. "What's yer name?"


	2. Quit bugging me!

Konahagakure. Early morning. Wednesday. Anko was walking forcefully toward her next hapless victim: a maple tree. Time for a fun pre-class workout. Anko was going to put so many kunai into this tree, it wouldn't know what hit it. Well, not that it would really know. It was a stupid tree (be nice to nature) and a tree couldn't possibly be aware of things like pain... or annoyance.

"Annn~~~~~ channnn~~~~"

"Don't call me that."

"Annn~~~~...chaaannnnn~~~~!"

"Shut up!"

"Tee-hee-hee!"

Stupid Aoi, inventing stupid nicknames for people who didn't want them...

It'd been a week since Aoi showed up. No matter how hard Anko tried, she could neither catch the girl, nor bring someone with her to verify the stranger's existence... nor be granted chance and have someone accidentally show up. Maybe she was going crazy...

Anko stared absentmindedly at the tree. If I could become a tree, I wonder if I would find her less annoying. Not that getting pelted with kunai seems like a fantastic career alternative, but maybe just to become strong enough to not let it bother me anymore...

"I've decided! I want to get even stronger!" Anko monologued. Aoi overheard. Obviously, since the nosy girl was following Anko around like a baby duck. It had nothing to do with the fact that Anko had just shouted so the word was now aware of her decision.

"Yay!" the stranger sang along, in ignorant bliss. "Eat a whole bunch! That's the way to get stronger!"

"Ah! You're right!" Anko sat down and prematurely opened her bento. Aoi did so as well.

~~

About half way through the bento, something struck Anko as strange. Very strange indeed. Where did this bento come from? She hadn't remembered packing one or buying one or carrying one with her to go train. Why was the rice so fragrant and creamy and slightly reminiscent of shrimp? It was like something out of an expensive restaurant. Neither Anko nor anyone Anko knew nor any shop Anko had ever visited before could produce rice as exquisite as this. More importantly, why did the bento have a section of live caterpillars in it? I mean, they were starting to crawl all over the place and being a nuisance. Just like a certain someone. Stupid Aoi, her stupid company was ruining the stupid bento with its stupid caterpillars and its stupid perfect rice...

Anko took a closer look at a grain of "rice" and screamed.

~~

"I'm sorry~~~"

"I hate you."

"I'm super-duper sorry!"

"What part of 'I hate you' don't you understand?! Who eats gross stuff like that?!"

"You just did."

"Aaaugh! I hate you!"

Silent tears.

"Don't cry!"

"I can't help it! An-chan hates me! Waugh!"

"Shut up!"


	3. Amends

Author's note: This chapter it dedicated to xBUzzOFF15x, who was kind enough to review my story and is officially my first fan! Words cannot describe my excitement!

~back to the story~

Konohagakure. That same Wednesday. Late afternoon. Anko was dumbfounded.

"You want me to eat something? That you brought me? Again?! How stupid do you think I am?"

"Aw, come on! From the looks of it, this weird stuff was never even alive before!"

"What are you trying to feed me, a rock? No thanks."

"Aw, come on!"

"No! If you think it's weird, there's no way I can eat it."

"But people from the village were eating it. From the way they were gobbling it up, it can't taste nearly as bad as it smells."

"You're not very good at convincing people, kid." Anko was glad she was up wind. If it smells bad and it's a rock, it must be sulfur? Why were people in town eating sulfur?

"I'll eat it first and everything! To show it's not poison!"

"Says the girl who was scarfing down caterpillars! You could eat toxic waste and still be okay."

"Thank you."

"That wasn't a compliment!"

"Awww..."

The sparkly blue eye looked down with disappointment. A short silence followed.

"...would you mind if I ate it, then?"

"Knock yer self out." Anko said as she began to walk away.

Anko heard a thud, and spun aroun, expecting a prank. Instead, Aoi had collapsed. Anko rushed over, and saw she was foaming at the mouth and couldn't breathe. Anko gave the girl a hard whack in the chest, and an amorphous lump flopped out of her mouth and onto the ground. Aoi writhed around and groaned while Anko looked down at the food which had done more damage to the kid than she had been able to. What she saw was a single stick of dango, with a one dumpling missing.


	4. An elusive poison

A great deal of coughing, complaining, salivating, and weird faces from Aoi's later...

"Who kills them self eating dango?!"

"I do."

"Shut up! How did you do that, anyway? Did you try to swallow the thing without chewing?"

Aoi, annoyingly, followed Anko's first order and stayed silent. She looked at anything around her, except Anko. Because no one who almost kills them self by accident readily admits to it. Or at least, that was what Anko suspected.

"Aaauugh! You are the most annoying thing ever!"

"Does that mean I'm the best at something?"

"No!"

"Awww..."

Anko crossed her arms in frustration and closed her eyes in contemplation. This kid was so annoying... She looked over at Aoi, who had been quiet for too long. Quiet from Aoi was more suspicious than quiet from a 2 year old.

Aoi sat, her face all scrunched up and down turned. She was crying.

"What now?" Anko snapped. She immediately regretted it. Aoi began to wail loudly. Anko was surprised her ear drums survived long enough to register the sound. Maybe this is some new decibel level. Perhaps all the local birds had just fainted, and were dropping to the ground like flies. A scientist from the sound village could write their thesis on this racket.

"Uwahhh! I just wanteded to get a purethent for An-than, but Ith wath poithoned! Uwahhh!" The girl tried to keep talking, but she was crying too hard.

"C-calm down! What do you mean poisoned?" Had Anko over looked the signs of poisoning? She hadn't noticed her go pale, and she was clearly responsive. By now, all she looked like was a crying child, and any signs of poisoning had been erased by the tears and the flushed face that came with it. Oh, poisoned, my butt. She just chocked on it!

"If you're really sorry, then stop crying!" The noise was awful! Please, just stop!

Aoi, unfortunately, cried harder. Anko raised her hand to hit her, but stopped. I just can't do it... She may be ungodly annoying, but she's a kid. Think, Anko. How do you get a kid to stop crying? Of every emotions class she had sat through, why wasn't something as basic as this covered? I mean, what if a kid was crying and that made a mission fail? Shouldn't she have been better prepared for this? Not everything is solved through brute force, no matter how much she wished it was. Especially right then and there.

Anko flashed back to a festival last summer. A little boy had bought his mother a pinwheel, but had tripped and broken it before he gave it to her. Just like the current situation, the decible level increased, though not nearly as much. She smiled anyway, fixed the pinwheel as best she could, and told her son how much she liked it. The boy then calmed down. So that's what Anko should do? Fix the broken present and show her everything was okay? Well, it was worth a shot.

Am I really going to do this? Anko thought, as she picked the stick of dango up off the ground. Since Anko was a ninja, she had built up a bit of resistance to poison, though she was still more convinced that Aoi had just choked herself. Still, the possibility remained.

"Aoi, Aoi." Anko calmly tried to get the girl's attention. "Th~... there, there. It's okay, see?" She patted her on the shoulder. "Aoi? Aoi! Look at me!" The tear streaked face looked over at Anko just in time to see the young ninja bite a dumpling off of the stick.

"Mmmm... nummy! Shee? Isht noth poithoned." Anko said with a mouth full of dango with a light dusting of dirt. She smiled as best she could and ignored the grit and sand between her teeth. Please work, please work, please work!

Aoi wiped her eyes and nose onto her bare arm. Ew. No, keep a straight face, Anko. You are a ninja. You can do this.

Aoi took a second to register what she was seeing. Once she figured it out, sparkles returned to her blue eyes.

"An-chan! That's so cool!"

"Huh?"

"You're eating sugar! And you're still okay!"

Wait, what?

"I almost died, but you're still fine! You must be magic or something!"

W-what had she said? Sugar?

"You mean to say... the 'poison'... was sugar?"

"Yeah, it's real gross! It tastes worse than anything in the whole wide world!"

Anko proceeded to throw the dango skewer with the remaining dumpling, a few handy rocks, and every shurikan and kunai she had on her at Aoi.

~~

Author's apology: I'm sorry. Anko gets a tiny bit Ooc here, but there wasn't any other way to progress the story (well, no way without having a "misunderstanding" floating around for 500 chapters *cough*Inuyasha*cough*).

But, as Anko says, she's a ninja, she can do this! Well, as I have made Anko say... but anyway. Being able to control your emotions is part of being a ninja. I think. Or something.


	5. Say that again

Author's rant: Since I want to keep this cannon loyal, anything not directly addressed by Kishimoto will be left as vauge as possible.

~back to the story~

Konohagakure, later that same Wednesday's evening.

Something struck Anko as strange. Even stranger than the sudden appearance of the caterpillar lunch box. And that was pretty danged strange.

No one asked her about the screaming on her way home. Why had no one noticed Aoi? I mean, it was the training grounds, but really? Shouldn't the entire country have heard that?

Anko walked to the dango shop before heading home. Dango was previously just a treat she loved as well as oddly coinciding with her name, but now it was a lethal weapon against a foe of great annoyance. She ordered the usual, three sticks of her name-sake. The old woman who was running the shop jumped when Anko gave her request.

"Ai-ya~~ you ninja are bad for an old woman's heart. I know you all try to be as quiet as a ghost, but couldn't you walk normally when you're back in town?" she spoke gently and with far more jest than malice.

"Sorry, granny." Anko said sheepishly as she tapped her knuckles to her head in a gesture to say 'silly me!'.

The old woman chuckled and handed her a plate of the shiny desert.

Anko sat outside and watched the horizon get darker.

"Hey, where ya been all day." Anko looked up and saw her classmate.

"Yo. Training." Anko replied after she swallowed a bite of dango.

"We were lookin' for ya after class. Wondered if ya wanted to train with us."

"Aw, man! That's what I get for running off ahead of you guys! Coulda wiped the forest floor with yer faces!" Anko smiled wryly. That would have been preferable to getting your eardrums assaulted.

"Ha... ha ha. Yeah, right."

"Catch me before I go running out the door tomorrow if I forget."

"Sure. Or you could just go down to the training grounds. That's where we all were until just now. See ya." her classmate said before trotting away.

Huh? Anko had just taken a big bite of dango. Did I just hear what I think just heard?


	6. Long Day

Konohagakure. Night of possibly the most eventful Wednesday Anko has ever had.

She was back at her home.

I'm back.

Where were you all day? It's already dark out!

Training, school, more training.

Are you hungry? It's almost time for dinner.

NO. I mean, I already ate.

I see.

I'm going to go to bed now. I'm pooped.

Take a bath first. After all that training, you must be sweaty.

Okay.

Anko reclined in the bath. Scrubbing a few hours worth of marathoning around after Aoi was like washing the experience away from the pages of history. Ugh. But it did happen. Her guts were reminding her of that. Or maybe they were just reminding her that all she had for dinner was dango. Or maybe that eating the "rice" wasn't such a brilliant idea. Anko wholeheartedly agreed with her stomach on the second point.

More importantly, Anko was worried about what she had heard at the dango shop. Could she and her classmates simply been on different ends of the training grounds? Had the others kept to the forest and neither party saw one another? Even if they hadn't seen Anko, they would have heard Aoi. Everything must have heard Aoi.

Or maybe they were spying on her and her inept companion. Or maybe spying on her own ineptitude of ridding herself of the annoyance. Ugh. I don't want to go to school if everyone's going to make fun of me for being slower than some brat. Some brat whose identity beyond her name was still, in fact, a mystery. Anko made a mental note to work on that.

Maybe everyone was slacking off and they were never really there. Which would make more sense, since there was no indication of ear drum damage from her classmate.

Anko decided the second option made more sense, and would lay a few traps for her classmates tomorrow morning for teasing her. Well, no harm ever came from getting your hand coated in stickers everytime you went to get something out of your desk... Anko made another mental note to only use pink ones for the boys.

Up in her room, Anko could almost hear a joke from downstairs about her becoming a delinquent for staying out so late, while her brain silently argued that she was going to be the strongest kunoichi after all that training. And Anko was sure to have acquired an immunity to some horrendous disease from that "rice". She shuddered.

"I don't ever want to look at a caterpillar again..." Anko said to herself as she rolled over in her bed and closed her eyes.

Author's explanation: Since Kishimoto doesn't explain Anko's home situation from before Orochimaru (or after Orochimaru, for that matter. Or her current living arrangement, now that I think about it), I cannot assume she had parents/ a parent/ a caretaker/ lived alone and had an imaginary friend. Therefore, the dialogue is without quotes, since an imaginary friend wouldn't speak out loud, and the dialogue segment can be interpreted as Anko reflecting on the conversation she just had, be it with a person or figment of her imagination. That's also why the other party is not named, nor given a title.

The classmate from last chapter, on the other hand, is clearly a relationship Anko had with someone. Well, with several someones. I know Hayate and Ibiki took the chunin exam with Anko (albeit on a different team, and those two are older), but they aren't important to the story, so I left the "classmate" unnamed (with no specified gender to boot).


	7. Tags

Konohagakure. Thursday afternoon.

Anko was staring at a partially written long term timed explosive tag, trying to figure out how to make one blow up if the enemy tried to disengage it. Figuring out the kanji wasn't hard, it was fitting everything on a piece of paper small enough to make the tag practical that was the problem. Of course, Anko wasn't arming the innocuous looking paper, since something small and annoying was peeking over her shoulder.

"What's that word mean? What's that one mean? Did you mean to put that line there? It's all blotchy and swirly. Wah-ha-ha! That part looks like a squirrel!"

"It's not cloud gazing! It's ninjutsu!"

"Drawing is ninjutsu?" Aoi said, looking a little unimpressed.

"No! It's an explosive tag!"

"Huh?"

"...the paper will go boom." Anko said, immediately regretting her response.

"Show me show me show me!" Aoi asked near hysterics. She was so excited Anko was a little scared the girl might pee herself.

"No." Anko said firmly.

"Show me show me show me!"

"No!"

"Aw, come on!"

"No! Go away! You're annoying!" Anko snapped.

Aoi sat a few feet away from her, hugging her knees and looking the other direction.

"Don't cry."

"I'm not... *hic*"

"I said don't cry!"

Aoi nodded in silence. Oh, for the love of...

"...fine. I'll show you." Anko said reluctantly. Aoi rubbed her face with her bare arm again, and turned around to see Anko wrap a piece of paper around a kunai and pitched it in the air. Not long after, there was indeed a big bang, and a plume of smoke. Well, plume may have been an understatement. The whole training grounds were engulfed in smoke.

"Wha... wha..." Anko stuttered. It never happened like that before...

"Big bang! Big bang! Woo-hoo-hoo-hoo!" Aoi jumped around. Anko cursed under her breath. You're only happy and jumping like that since you're in the only smoke free patch of the entire joint. Gaa... my eyes sting a little.


End file.
